Cargo Cult Web Performance Optimization

26 November 2012No Comment

Put your CSS at the top, JavaScript at the bottom, domain shard all the things, and so on! But why? Do these rules even make sense? The modern browser is not the black box it used to be. We can peek inside and see how it really works—we have the source code for WebKit, Chromium, and Firefox!

In this talk we’ll disassemble the basic architecture of WebKit / Chromium and see how it all comes together: from receiving the HTML bytes on the wire, to constructing the DOM, fetching the resources, performing the layout, and finally painting the pixels to the screen. Armed with this knowledge, we can then dismantle some of the web performance myths found in most every “performance top 10″ list, and see how we can build better and faster web apps, regardless of the framework you’re using.